Many forms of media content, including both audio-only and audiovisual, are available to consumers today. Several popular forms for delivering such media content include over-the-air (OTA) broadcast, satellite, cable, Internet-streaming and/or downloaded, etc. As one example, Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is a multimedia delivery platform that utilizes a packet-based network infrastructure (e.g., broadband Internet access networks) to deliver audio-visual content to customers, as an alternative or in addition to delivery by traditional over-the-air television, satellite television, and cable television.
Many forms of media content are provided to consumers (also referred to as users, end users, viewers, customers, subscribers, etc.) along with supplemental or promotional content. For example, many broadcast and cable content providers may provide a 30-minute block of programming including approximately 22 minutes of a program interleaved with several commercial breaks, totaling around 8 minutes. Similarly, for some content streamed over-the-top (OTT) of the Internet, such as streaming video providers or streaming audio providers, a media content item such as a video or song may be preceded by one or more advertisements, split into multiple segments with intermediary advertisements, and/or be followed by additional advertisements.
With the advent of modern two-way communications—as opposed to one-way OTA broadcast communications—content providers have become able to customize the content provided to their users, sometimes based upon real-time user input. Thus, in addition to media content providers being able to select and provide particular advertisements to particular users based upon their usage history, demographics, etc., content providers can even enable users to “skip” advertisements that are not relevant to the user. For example, before viewing a particular piece of video content, a user could choose to skip viewing a first provided advertisement and instead be presented with a different advertisement that may be more relevant to the user—upon the completion of that advertisement, then, the user can view the desired content. As another example, before listening to a desired song, a user may be allowed to skip a remainder of an advertisement and instead immediately be presented with the originally-desired content once a particular amount of the advertisement (e.g., half of the ad, 10 seconds of the ad) has been played.
However, these techniques for allowing user-directed customization of media content (e.g., advertisements) during programming having fixed-length breaks—such as “live” streams of substantially live content like sporting events or concerts—do not work. For example, allowing a user to completely skip an advertisement after 10 seconds of a 60-second break would result in the user waiting for 50 seconds for the programming to continue, resulting in “dead air” where the user is completely disengaged or wondering if the system is broken. As another example, allowing a user to skip a first advertisement after it has begun playing in favor of another advertisement suffers from a similar problem—either the advertisements will end well before the end of the break (again leaving dead air), or an advertisement will be “clipped” off such that only a part of its content is presented to the user before the programming continues. Clipped content can result in confused or upset users, as well as upset providers of the content, who did not get their entire content presented to the user.
Accordingly, systems avoiding these shortcomings while allowing for user-directed customized content during programming with fixed-duration breaks are desired.